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REVIEW
Exposing your assets
Putting all your customer data into a
o you let staff throw parties in your offices on the weekend?
unified view creates risks and exposure
D
Or take your trucks home to remove their junk to the recycling
centre? Chances are you don’t – the keys are kept safe with
only authorised people allowed access for specified tasks.
that need to be carefully managed.
So why is it that customer data is not treated with the same degree
of care? It is slowly dawning on companies which have built a single
David Reed reports.
customer view that it is a valuable asset. In a survey carried out by
DataFlux, nine out of ten respondents said SCV was valued just like
buildings or people.
Yet at the same time, one quarter had no form of data governance
structure in place to guard that asset. Some observers believe this
figure is on the low side and that a far higher proportion of companies
would find their SCV is exposed to abuse, theft or harm as a result of
not putting the right people, processes and technologies around it.
Colin Rickard, managing director, DataFlux UK, believes the problem
starts with the original business case: “A number of organisations made
a huge investment into SCV. What percentage of that do they put into
governance or maintenance of the content in that system?”
While the proportion of spend involved would be small, the impact
of failing to make it is often disproportionate. At a simple level, the
company will waste money on failed efforts to communicate with
customers. At a higher level, it could end up suffering brand damage
when customer records get lost or stolen.
Rickard believes that it is no coincidence that governance is now
rising up the corporate agenda. “There is a time lag factor – it takes
time for things to go wrong,” he says. During a data migration
exercise, for example, a new corporate standard for data quality and
data models may be imposed.
Once the new operational system goes live, data will steadily start
to degrade. Over time, those errors pile up until they may eventually
create a blockage to a process.
“There is a rate of decay and creeping degradation. That will
continue unless you have got data governance in place,” warns Rickard.
Even so, he believes things are changing with many organisations
deciding not to wait until they face a problem before implementing data
quality controls and processes. Strategic KPIs are starting to be introduced
which include such measures as the level of duplication in a SCV. “That is
about identifying when data dips below a key threshhold,” he says.
When an organisation does wake up to the need for some data asset
management, where should it start? One approach might be to audit
how well the organisation is currently doing, both internally and
compared to an external benchmark, across the range of governance
issues, from compliance to security and data quality.
Data Measures, the free-to-use online survey from DQM Group,
provides an immediate fix as to where the business sits. “Our starting
point is that you have got to protect your SCV – it is an asset that is far
more valuable than just a database where you keep files separately,”
says managing director Adrian Gregory. “When you have got all your
data in one place, you also have more acccess points and more risks.”
Organisations need to understand what data is being held, where it
comes from, who has access and for what uses. Each of these creates
a potential exposure and requires both management and tracking.
Gregory believes that one of the reasons for the slow development
of data governance is the way it conflicts with the business purpose
of a SCV. “Because it is often driven by marketing, they will be
looking at opportunities, rather than risk. For finance and IT, risk is
higher on the agenda,” he says. a167
DATA STRATEGY | REPORT | APRIL 2009 13
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